Big theories today:
- Big Bang
- Judeo/Christian
- Evolution
What I've noticed about a lot of modern beliefs is that, compared to old stories, we're boring. I mean, if we're just guessing and speculating, couldn't we make it a little more interesting? When did Zeus making Cronus vomit up the Greek gods turn into pages and pages of how little tiny differences added up until we were slightly more human than monkey?
Our stories--sorry, theories--are mostly ex nihilo or primal unity theories. There are five categories that most theories fall into:
- ex nihilo: from Latin "out of nothing"
- Earth-diver: an animal or god dives from above (heaven, the ocean etc.) and ends up creating Earth/mankind/plants/all that other good stuff
- Primal Unity: unity breaks apart and Earth is created from the damage
- Dismemberment: something is chopped apart and its head becomes the mountains, its blood oceans, that sort of lovely story
- Emergence: life just kind of happens
So evolution and the Big Bang would fall somewhere between ex nihilo and emergence, depending on the scientist's personal views. The common belief seems to be that the universe was simply there forever, which is more of an emergence theme. The Big Bang could also be called primal unity if you look at the explosion as breaking things apart rather than creating.
Why do we need creation stories, anyway? It seems like everyone has a really hard time imagining living without an idea of where they came from and how they were made. But why? Does it affect how we live our lives?
My theory is that we base a lot of ourselves, our sense of self-worth and how we live our lives, on our views of where we came from and why we're here. Someone with a deep faith in Christianity may work extremely hard to do good in their lives and look forward to death to go to Heaven, while a Buddhist may work equally hard with the end goal of being reincarnated into a good form. Many Mormons believe if they live good lives and follow the teachings of Joseph Smith, they will one day be the gods of their own worlds. Atheists and agnostics are generally less concerned with the goal after death and more concerned with life, as they believe that there isn't much to look forward to after this world. No matter what you believe, it affects what you do, how you think and act, and what you want and expect out of life. Creation stories set the floor for that by giving us a sense of what we're worth in the first place--molded out of clay by a drunk god, formed out of a dead god's blood, or even vomited into existence (I think I prefer the clay theories...)
To go on about the fact that we have created myths. I believe that we created these stories or theories to try and figure out where we came from and why we are here, we are scared of the unknown, which is why we think up stories of how things are how they are. If we did not then we would just not know, and that is apparently scary. The fact that we have created Gods is more comforting to us, rather than saying we are just here by mistake and the only higher power is the government... So we created Gods and theories of how we came to be, Big Bang for people who simply cannot believe that there is really a magical man that made us in 7 days, well 6 because he rested on the 7th... And God because we have to have been created by someone, right? We could all have it wrong, so really there is still the unknown, but no one chooses to believe that because it is unknown.
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