Coming or Going?
At the trailhead of the Gila Cliff Dwellings in southwest New Mexico, I overheard the conversation of another group of hikers.
“Does the Bible mention Darwin?” one young lady asked another.
“No, I don’t think so,” the other said.
These hikers were part of a larger group that had gone up the mountainside before us. These were the teens and tweens of what looked like two families with children as young as my 5 and 7-year-olds and adults as old as my forty-something.
The girls went on: “Did the dinosaurs get on Noah’s Ark?”
The other girl—the authority of this smaller group—said, emphatically: “Yes. You see, the animals were supposed to go two-by-two on the Ark. The dinosaurs must have been on there.”
So, there. It was solved. There were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
The rest of the afternoon, I kept thinking to myself: does that family truly believe that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark? Clearly the girls are aware that dinosaurs existed, but they were trying to square that with their belief in Noah’s Ark.
But wait, did they actually believe in Noah’s Ark?
I imagined their parents reminding them of these biblical stories, and that’s all that they are—stories. Children believe the stories their parents tell them, even if they don’t fit into a universally accepted scientific narrative.
I quietly chided this family in my mind, how they likely also held the belief that wearing face masks wasn’t necessary in this National Monument where there were other people than themselves.
My mixed feelings for them subsided as the day went on, and as I reconnected with empathy.
Those people are not bad or evil or mean. They are honest human beings whose world views are very different from mine. While I judge them in my mind as they judge me, there is no wrong or right point of view.
There is only balance, and these two polar opposite perspectives provide that.
That is how we evolve as a species, I suppose: in the stories we tell our children. It’s the ultimate passing down of these that keep our humanity going, faithful in our shared beliefs that we will continue to inherit the earth.
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Photo by Katie Smith on Unsplash