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بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمنِ الرَّحِيمِ

I picked up one of Karen Armstrong’s books recently only because of all the rave it got (and not being a “pop culture” book). The except below is from the intro.

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4000 Year Conquest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Random House, 1993.

“One of the reasons why religions seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and natural world in front of us. This method of looking at the world has achieved great results. One of its consequences, however, is that was have, as it were, edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was on an essential component of our human experience of the world. In the South Sea Islands, they call this mysterious force mana; others experience it as a presence or spirit; sometimes it has been felt as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity. It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals. The Latins experienced numina (spirits) in sacred groves; Arabs felt that the landscape was populated by the jinn. Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this reality and make it work for them, but they also wanted to simply admire it. When they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sun, sea, and starts but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them. ”

It really got me thinking – as it seems even the historic people felt the need to appreciate the “unseen”. Recognizing it’s existence even if we have no way of seeing, touching, feeling, or hearing it. That seems to be something we’ve really lost today, the ability to accept that there are likely things beyond our comprehension. It also seems so obtuse and arrogant to say that “if I (I, we, science, etc.) can’t detect it, it must not exist.”

We are human, and by nature are restricted. There are animals with better sight, hearing, and smell than us – and we are not EVEN close to understanding how all animals operate. Heck, we’re not even 100% sure how everything in our own bodies operate. To simply say “there is nothing” when it’s impossible to know for certain… just blows my mind. As a friend once said to me “there is too much naturally occurring order in the world for there not to be a God.”