Discovery of New Worlds

I am looking for something positive to say about the state of things and the way we look at things past and present.

Today is the traditional Columbus Day Holiday. It celebrates the first big hyped European recognition of something (America) beyond the seas. Before Columbus there was travel to America for centuries and even millennium. It is just that on this day in 1492 the facts about an outside world made it into the Evening News so to speak.

I happened to be trekking around the desert in 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of whatever, around this date in a car and we directly or indirectly came upon three ancient Mission sites in Arizona. Two of those sites are still active. The trip make me realize how in the great expanse of the west, lines on a map in Madrid did not mean anything. The reality of tiny satellite settlements of European culture back then, centuries ago, survived not so much by the grace of God as by pure dumb luck generated by the pro-active curiosity of explorers.

This culture thing changes almost every few years. When I was a school child, Columbus was a hero. In 1992 he was nearly labeled some genocidal maniac by revisionist history. Somewhere in between Hero and Criminal is the probable truth about Christopher Columbus.

When one age tries to impose its own view of the world onto some other time or some other culture there can be conflicts.

A lot of religious wing nuts seem to want the world to end? Why? It says so or supposedly says so in the Bible. The last book of the Bible, Revelations, is a contorted weed driven vision of nasty things, un-Christian things. Still, rather than enjoy the world God has directly or indirectly provided us on spaceship Earth, some would prefer destruction over construction.

One recent thing in the news and shortly in the movies is the concept that the world will end on December 21, 2012 – Pure Unadulterated Horse Manure. Why? The Mayan calendar says so. Well actually it does not say anything. Most Mayan writings were burned by religious wing nuts as satanic centuries ago. The little writing that did survive is a mere scattering of words from that long dead civilization, long dead before the Spanish arrived.

An interesting quote from an Archeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico regarding the 2012 Mayan Calendar hype:

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

If Western mythology is indeed dead, then it makes sense that lunatics cling to the Bible for some sort of answer – the Bible is full of myths – many tired myths.

God created the human race to improve itself. To build on myth and not to cling to myth.

Myth builders like Columbus pursued the world to change it. Others sit back and reshape the world with words. Imagination and perspiration are two things that once made America great – not myths.

I think that there is a hidden intentional built-in challenge for us in the New Testament. It is to get beyond the roadblock of Revelations, a great boulder for some in the pathway to light. For the others of us that understand the message of Jesus in a much more divinely human sense, roadblocks are there to be overcome.

Myths are fine. Reality is better. Words at the beginning of the Bible are perhaps the best words to remember on the road of life. “Let there be light.” (to illuminate your pathway…)

Have a good day and don’t fuss too much over the Political Correctness of explorers of brave new worlds like C. Columbus etc.

Explore your own new worlds. There are plenty of them to explore. Make your own myths to hand down to the future.

;)