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Come to Think of It, Maybe We Are Living in the New Babylon
Our religious myths will define us whether we like it or not
“Do you know that the Babylonians believed a pig ate the moon?”
I was talking to my college-aged daughter while we were out walking the dog. The conversation had turned to the history of science and how people had been trying to figure out how the cosmos worked. That night’s moon provided a handy example about how people eventually honed myths into theories. Or so I thought.
She stopped and looked at me.
“A pig?”
“Something. Maybe a snake or a cow, but lots of ancient cultures believed a version of that,” I said. “How haven’t you heard this before?”
She ignored the question.
“But it doesn’t look like a pig,” she said, emphatic and a little insulted. “You can see there’s no pig up there eating.”
This had never occurred to me before. Or maybe it’s best to say that I hadn’t thought about it. The myth was just a part of primitive belief trivia for me.
“Maybe it was an invisible pig,” I suggested.
“You can still see the rest of the moon,” she said. “Look!”
