Thoughts on Noah and the Ark

 

My four year old son and I have a game that he likes to play in the car called "T-Rex and Garbageadon." In this game, I am both the T-Rex and Garbageadon, one dinosaur and one "dino truck," and I'm always hungry. Garbageadon likes to eat trash, so my son will look for objects around him that he pretends he can feed me. "Garbageadon, here's some paper! Garbageadon, there's a car you can eat!" I gobble them up with loud "Om nom nom" noises and he giggles in delight.

T-Rex is a little more tricky to feed, because T-Rex is a carnivore, and wants to eat people. My son usually solves this problem by pretending to go through the Chick-fil-a drive thru (I adopt a pleasant voice and ask him how I can help him today; if there was an Emmy for acting while driving, I'd win it) and ordering thousands of chicken nuggets. Actually the number he orders is "twenty-six thirty-one," which is the number he uses to represent the concept of A WHOLE LOT. He then shares these nuggets with T-Rex, asking T-Rex to save him a few, which T-Rex almost always forgets to do. She's a hungry dinosaur.

Once the imaginary nuggets run out, T-Rex wants to eat people. I start by asking if I can eat him; my son says no. Then I say, "Can I eat your mom and dad?" He loudly protests and starts down a long list of people who T-Rex cannot, under any circumstance, eat: his sister, his grandparents, his teacher, his friends, his aunts and uncles, and so on. T-Rex usually sighs in resignation, says, "Okay, well then you need to get me some more food!," and back to the imaginary drive thru we go. 

One day, I asked him, "Can I eat the people in the car in front of me?" He shrugged and said, "Sure!" I blinked.

"Wait, so it's okay to eat some people?"

"Yeah, I don't know them. They're not in my family. I don't care about them!" 

Of course this millennial parent then had to launch into a conversation about caring for other people and having empathy and did you ever consider that THOSE people in THAT car probably are somebody's mom and dad or aunt and uncle too?! All while my four year old rolled his eyes and asked where T-Rex and Garbageadon had gone.

I finally realized that, while my son is starting to show plenty of signs of empathy, he's still in the egocentric stage of development. It's less likely that he's a sociopath and more likely that he's just a preschooler. His world revolves around himself and the people he loves; everyone else is a supporting character like Garbageadon. 

He's four years old. I'm not sure what evangelical Christianity's excuse is.

The other day I found the sole religious text in our household that survived the purges over the years: a children's bible. It has pared down versions of key bible stories, with simplified text and a little box at the end of each one with the big takeaway from the story. The illustrations are bright and cheerful. I flipped through the pages and landed on the end of the story about Noah and the Ark. The picture showed Noah and his family and the happy animals getting off the ark, surrounded by verdant lush land to settle in, a huge rainbow beaming down on them. The takeaway--the key object lesson--in the box was, "God takes care of us and keeps us safe too." 

That right there is the problem, folks. That's why so many people can't stand American Evangelical Christians these days. 

If you can read a story about God destroying 99.99999999% of life on earth--literally wiping out everyone and everything except for one tiny family and a (comparative) handful of representative animals--and your takeaway is that "God keeps US safe," you're operating at the same level of empathy as my four year old. Maybe even worse; he at least included his teacher and friends on his 'safe list.' Noah's kids' playmates were floating corpses on a vast ocean. 

You can claim to care for and love other people, and even mean it. You can do all the good in the world for other people. But at the end of the day, you worship and declare total adoration for a deity that, according to your stories, views people as disposable. The bottom line is that if God decided to wipe out humanity and only save your little in-group (which is what you believe will happen if you believe in hell), you'd cheer him on and praise him for it. It's hard to say 'thank you' for the charitable donations when I consider that reality. 

If anyone were to ask me why I lost my faith, or why I started to question the idea of the Christian God and everything that went along with it, here is one way I could say it: 

I started identifying more with the other 99.99999999% of humanity in that story than I did with Noah and his family.