Welcome to a problem-identifying node of the Pandeism index!!
Vanity of vanities, what is vanity?
A peculiar discussion of this issue arises in the
Judeo-Christian storybook itself, in
Ecclesiastes 1...
1:1
The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
1:2
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
1:3
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
1:4
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
1:5
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
1:6
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
1:7
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
1:8
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
1:9
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
1:10
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
1:11
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
So what were the
authors of the JCB trying to say, writing those striking words into the mouth of this minor
character? The
conclusion that they themselves draw is that all human
endeavor seems like a vain and
futile endeavor -- but it is, in actuality, not so -- for they
feverishly imagine the
all-powerful deity of their
myths to be intently focused on such things, to the point of playing an adoring
hand in all of it.
But what is the very
definition of vanity? In those olden days of myth-scribbling, it indeed meant
futility. But as it has matured into modern
meaning, is it not
self-love? Placing oneself on a
pedestal relative to the
world, perhaps even relative to the rest of the
Universe, to the point of
self-worship? And yet, such is what
theists do daily, when they imagine that there is, hovering over the Universe, a being of such power that it was able to create the whole majesty of the Universe, galaxies upon galaxies, in but a
thought -- and yet, that this all-powerful (or, at the least, incomprehensibly powerful) entity is, in actuality, beneath even then, for it so
loves them that it can be made into a
servant, to bend the
laws of the Universe in their favor, dutifully answering their
prayers, delivering them into an eternal
paradise (sustained by it) for so small a gesture as the mere acknowledgment of its very
existence.
Your Bacteria and You
And now for what will surely seem a wholly unrelated
tangent, with some very, very big numbers to consider....
The
human body is made of
cells, with the
average human body having some 50
trillion to 100 trillion cells. But our typical body cell is one hundred times the size of a typical
bacteria, and it happens that the number of bacteria in your body at any given moment is about
ten times the number of your own body cells, so a
rock bottom estimate would be of 500 trillion bacteria inhabiting your adult body -- the great majority of those
congregating in your intestines, fulfilled to spend their thirty hours or so of life (during which time they will split off dozens of generations of offspring) eating some portion of that which has passed your
stomach and is traveling on the path to
expulsion from the nether end of your body. And, in actuality, the solid part of what comes out the other end is less than 40% made from whatever had gone into your mouth in the first place, 60% being bacteria, both living and dead bodies. Lest this sound like a health hazard, note well that their activity is continuously contributing to your own survival, even -- existing in a
symbiotic relationship with us, breaking down
complex molecules that our bodies by themselves cannot.
Now, imagine that some several billion of those bacteria in your intestines are not only aiding in your digestion, not only aimlessly (if not lazily) coating and floating along your intestinal walls, but are actively
worshiping your stomach (which would to them seem like an incalculably large and powerful sustenance-providing entity); imagine them as having taken your stomach as a
deity. And, even, arguing among themselves about which groups of them your stomach favor most, and which ones are
blasphemously engaged in forms of worship disfavored by The Stomach. These faithful insist to dissenters from their faith that your stomach, the being from which they are provided,
loves each of them, individually; that it
desires their worship and is pleased by their
prayers or their
sacrifices, so much so that it will from time to time even grant those prayers (such that every chunk of modestly-digested
particulate matter that floats by is
preached to
testify to your stomach's loving
intercession).
Your bacteria pass down stories of your stomach's
commandments, have
catalogued a
list of
sins -- claimed to come from your stomach's personal
instruction, by way of
visions or
prophet-bacteria -- which they must avoid or
repent for!! They speak of how your stomach holds certain specific
micro-villi on your intestinal walls to be sacred places worthy of
fighting and
dying for, and some even tell of how your stomach itself came down to your own intestines as a bacteria, to live and die among them, as one of them, to sacrifice itself
to itself in order to atone for the sinfulness of all your intestinal bacteria.
Orders of Magnitude
You should rightly think it absurd that your stomach is any sort of deity, much less that
you yourself, a
human, so far above those
creatures, could even take notice of their lives (and surely you do not!! To look at a tiny few under a
microscope, you would think them but a dumb
curiosity; and the vast number of them you simply
flush away) -- and yet here are they vainly
thinking themselves important enough to
trouble you, through your stomach, to address the problems of their fleeting lives, even as they
cloak this bothersome
self-importance in the
frame of
you being worshiped by them, you solving their problems for them because they are, after all, your
beloved supplicants. This is hardly different from a human vainly think itself important enough to trouble the same being that it claims to be the
Creator and
sustainer of a
Universe which is so vast we can't even conceptualize the number of stars in one single, relatively tiny galaxy, of which our entire
planetary system is a dot on an edge.
Consider just a few more inconceivable numbers, now. A typical bacteria is a millionth of a billionth of your size. And yet it is much bigger compared to you than you are compared to the planet
Earth, of which you are perhaps one millionth of a millionth of a billionth part. If you, curled up in a ball, were the size of Earth, than a lone bacteria on your skin would be as large as a good-sized office building. And the deity that is imagined to bear such love for humans, has it so intimate a relationship with these bacteria? And if not, why not? On the
scale of its own Universe-encompassing
magnitude, there is little difference between us -- where would the cutoff point lie? Is it at
vertebrates? Is it
mammals? Does it come after all other
apes, and yet before the hairless ape? Some
chimps are smarter than certain humans, are those humans
forsaken, or are those chimps elevated to the theological status of humans, or does this deity practice
speciesism even in favor of the genetically virtually indistinguishable "top" primates of this tiny planet? Does it care equally for the
neanderthal, who went extinct? For intelligent
dolphins and
whales?
And,
as we are just beginning to learn to manipulate our own genetic code so as to improve greatly on the flawed design that we have inherited, will our millennia-future perfected selves not merit the drawing of another such line, taking favor above old Twenty-First Century man?
And so we end this digression and come back to the true vanity of vanities, the stunningly peculiar belief by some humans that they might be held of some import -- indeed that they might
adored to the point of prayers being answered and eternal reward being laid at their feet -- by an entity capable of creating an unimaginably vast and full Universe and sustaining that Creation for tens of billions of years before human feet ever dusted the ground of a tiny planet circling a tiny star of a small galaxy lost in a cluster spinning among billions of others therein. Our Universe may well be an object of intentional and intelligent Creation; but as easy as it is to be mislead, as strongly as men desire to be beloved by so great a being as such a Creator, men simply think far too much of themselves to imagine themselves as the focal point of the Universe-maker's adoration.