May the Force Be With You

I was at a funeral in the mid 1980s and this man who passed on had a son who got up and was in his late 20s or early 30s. He said, "My Dad was pretty difficult because everyone had to be just as Christian as he was in the way that he was but basically, I believe "May the Force Be With You!" and he walked off the funeral podium with that. I thought to myself, "Good for you, son!" I couldn't really say that but that is what I felt.

There is something about the first Star Wars movie where we meet Luke Skywalker that so says what life is about for so many young men and women. I know I have tried to read the Bible many times and realized most times that it had been translated so many times and was now just so many thousand years culturally out of step on top of mistranslations that anyone who now takes the Bible literally has to be scarily ignorant. Because almost nothing comes across now the way it was originally meant. And just like our horror at legalized rape in Afghanistan, imagine how horrified we would have been to witness one of the many mass genocides of whole cultures and nations within the Bible. Imagine the people who actually perpetrated such genocides. Would you even want to know such people today?

No. There is no way today to have actual meaningful empathy for such people because it is just now so completely out of context to anything we now know.

All of us have a hard enough time just making sense of our world today let alone trying to figure the motivations of likely mythical people maybe 7000 years ago when a comet hit the Hudson Bay and killed everyone below about 3500 feet in elevation in the Northern hemisphere. This was likely the Noah's Ark phenomenon and could have been simaltaneously the Moses phenomenon because the water drained from the Red Sea which drained from the Indian Ocean below the Equator.

Even as I try to speak of these things I can only speak in hypothesis. Even 10 or 20 years from now someone might speak of the articles and books I write and try to figure out whether I was writing truth or fiction or what my motivations were in writing and they might be wrong. How much further wrong can people be about things that happened 2000,4000, 6000, 8000 years ago or more?

Even when people tell me about what the 1960s were like who weren't there sound like idiots to me because I lived in Los Angeles and visited the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco and met all kinds of other people who lived those times too. And they were not like ANY of the caricatures people now speak about. And this is only 40 years after the fact. How much further wrong are people who speak about things 2000 to 8000 years ago?