Life

I guess from the creation of the universe and the Sun and the Earth, the next logical step for me to take is the introduction of life. This is again something that we have yet to explain. We have scientific theories that perhaps life arrived here on a meteor. Maybe, but where did it come from? How was life created there? Again we don’t have, and may never have an explanation. But there is one. We will never know for sure anyway, unless time travel becomes a reality.
So, life is created. From there I believe the majority of my readers would be comfortable with evolution. Single cell organisms become fish, fish eat other fish. One fish finds safety on the surface of the water, eventually ends up on land. Fish becomes a lizard, lizard a mouse, mouse a monkey, monkey a man, or whatever unimaginable chain of events actually occurred. Again I simplify for sake of sanity.
So now we have man. Through evolution we begin to walk upright so we can reach fruit and wield clubs. Our brains grow bigger, our muscles smaller. We are slow and weak, so we find safety in numbers. We learn to watch out for one another. By acting as a tribe we can survive. We share food and shelter. We learn to discern each person from another; by doing so we know if they are friend or foe. Each member begins to fill a role. Some are the protectors, some the hunters, some the caregivers, some the gatherers.
We learn to recognize one another. By doing so we can discern who is trust worthy, who is a good gatherer and who is a good baby sitter. We know who belongs in our tribe. Those outside the tribe are not to be trusted. They may be dangerous; they may want what we have, what we need.
Now I will point out another re-occurring theme of this paper, a tangent.
This behavior of recognizing one another and trusting those we know, those who look and act like us has roots in survival instinct. Undoubtedly as tribes expanded, and it became increasingly difficult to remember every member of the tribe we probably found ways to be more recognizable to one another. As simple as wearing the same kind of bird feather, to as complex as say, placing huge disks in our ears or tattooing our skin.
I would suggest that cultural traits may have had such humble beginnings. Why the Scotts wear skirts and the Muslims turbans, and me a ball cap. Obviously these things have greatly evolved over time and taken on other meanings and are worn for other reasons. Time has a way of complicating some things. This isn’t my main point of this particular tangent however.
My main point would be that this is the root of racism. This is why if someone doesn’t look and act just like I do I may not trust them, and then hate them. It is a survival mechanism.
If I do not directly recognize someone then I do not know if I can trust him/her. My next instinctual step is to see if he/she looks like me and the people I know. If he/she does then there is a much greater possibility that he/she thinks like me, acts like me, and ultimately may be a member of my tribe and ok to trust. This is the simplified version of why black people are more comfortable around black people, whites around whites, tattooed people around tattooed people, and people in togas around other people in togas. Tangent complete.
Ok, so we have tribes. We have learned to feed ourselves efficiently, cloth ourselves and shelter ourselves. Now what do we do?
Essentially now we are bored. We sit around with nothing to do, so we begin to think. (Doesn’t that happen to you? Do you think more when your home alone and bored or swamped at work?) Our brains have greatly developed thanks to our balanced diets and upright stance. So we think.
From thinking we invent things to make our life easier. We learn to make pretty, interesting things that bring joy. We learn how to communicate better to one another and how record what we do and how.
We also ask questions about the world around us. Why does that plant make me sick when I eat it, and not the other? Why does the river run that direction, and where does it end up? What is water? Why am I here? How did I get here?
From here we develop spears, language, art and religion. Life has developed into us almost as we are today. Life leads to religion, my main focus here, and the start of my next chapter.