When I first moved from Canada to New Zealand, the bugs took a bit of getting used to. A week in, we’d already experienced our first earthquake and a year’s worth of rain. Then, my wife found a huge spider in our rental house and the whole incident wasn’t pretty. Both literally and figuratively:
A tunnelweb spider in New Zealand
Determined to arm myself with the best possible information about New Zealand bugs, I was off to the bookstore to identify this beast. This was my conversation with the teenage bookstore worker:
Me: Do you have a section on insects and spiders?
Her: Ewww… I don’t know much about that… I try to stay away from bug stuff…
Me: We had a spider in the house and I want to know what it is. I’m a bit confused about why none of the windows have screens on them. We have screens in Canada.
Her: But why? What could get in?
In the awkward silence that followed, I tried to process the massive cognitive dissonance that she handled like a cool breeze on a hot day.
I thought that I’d go a long time before seeing that kind of mental schism again, but then it hit me that Christians live with it day-in and day-out. I raised a topic on CARM forums recently about how all religions look ridiculous from the outside. The responses are interesting to say the least.
For some reason, Christians feel that their magic apple and talking serpent make more sense than a flying horse-like creature or a half-man/half-bull creature guarding a maze. I don’t understand how some magic is real and all the rest is just some crazy fiction with no basis in historical fact.
To me, this is the single most powerful argument against religion of any kind, the fact that religions are dismissive of similar beliefs in other religions – they are almost self-dismissive because of this.
Long dead religions whose supernatural beliefs look ridiculous to us today (even Christians and Jews) were, at one time, believed by thousands, if not millions of people. These religions had priests and priestesses, temples, sacrifices and prayers and were, in many ways, identical to modern religions. Why are their beliefs and holy books dismissed today?
More importantly, why doesn’t everyone see that today’s modern religions have the same kind of silly beliefs?
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