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Edited on Thu Jun-28-07 03:16 AM by Mythsaje
Let's imagine a world in which a man, an intelligent, clever, and cunning man, managed to convince his neighbors that aliens from another world had come down and shared the secrets of the universe with him. Let's assume that this man had a single object, a gadget of some sort, that did something no other gadget could do at the time.
It was his contention that this gadget had been given to him by his alien visitors. In time, he grew to have great prestige in his town, and people from all over came to see him and watch him work his gadget.
In time, however, the gadget stopped working and people forgot about him except for the people who lived with him. He married, had children, told his story to his children and then grandchildren, and eventually died. Over time, the thing became something of a family legend, with no one knowing whether it was truth or fiction.
Then one day his grandson stumbled upon this gadget and, working from the family stories upon which he'd been raised, set about writing a book about his grandfather's experiences. Because times had changed, these tales gained a wider audience than they had originally. Because of this gadget, which no longer worked, but remained as mysterious as ever, people began to believe the stories as real. That this man HAD been visited by aliens, and they'd told him things that no other human had ever known.
The popularity of this belief grew until a large segment of the country took what the young man, the original man's grandson, had written in his book as being the absolute truth. They had no doubt that the aliens had been here, and passed along their knowledge.
It was accepted as fact that they did not approve of certain things. To the aliens, the idea of kissing was disgusting, and fathers should never speak to their children until they were over the age of ten Earth years. The eating of fruits was against the laws of nature, according to these aliens, and all fruits should be turned into juice before being consumed.
Humans should not ride horses, they said, and oxen should not be used to plow their fields. Man should travel and do his work under his own power.
And the people grew to accept these things as just the way things should be.
Laws were passed that made the things illegal that the aliens did not like, and that mandated the things the aliens wanted done be done as they had requested, as passed along originally to the old man and later recorded by his grandson.
But some people didn't believe in these aliens in the first place. But they too were forced to bow down to the pressure to act as though they did. Disbelieving in the sky-men, they were told, would result in them coming back and stealing their bodies, which they would then wear like a suit of clothes.
Not believing was a crime, for wasn't it obvious that the aliens had come and shared their knowledge with the old man? Wasn't it all written in the Book? And hadn't everyone seen the alien artifact, now kept in a place of great honor where everyone could look upon it?
When it became known to these people that those of a neighboring land not only spoke in disbelief of the aliens, but actually enslaved horses and oxen to do their labors, they made war upon these neighbors and, in time, overthrew their rulers and impressed upon them the rules given to them by the old man's grandson.
Nation after nation fell in much the same way, until the followers of the aliens were the most powerful people in the world.
People that did not believe did so in secret, hiding their disbelief from their neighbors, lest they be charged with a crime. For generations this continued in much the same way, until, finally, the absolute faith in this story began to wane somewhat. Maybe the aliens were real, some people said, but what if the stories weren't exactly true? What if mistakes were made, for hadn't the younger man simply recorded what he REMEMBERED of the old man's tales?
The older generation, who'd grown up in absolute certitude, heaped mountains of scorn upon these new speakers, saying that the fact that the belief had lasted this long, and that it had spread throughout the world, was definite proof of its validity.
The moderates did not agree with this assessment, and went so far as to say that those who chose not to believe shouldn't be prosecuted for it. The believers and unbelievers stood on opposite sides of an unbridgable chasm. The words of the aliens were sacrosanct, some said, for hadn't they spoken them directly to the old man?
"We don't even know if the old man spoke to anyone." the disbelievers replied. "Maybe he simply invented the stories to make himself more important."
And in the end, no one really knew one way or another.
Then a group of wise men and women sat down with the Book, and read it and discussed it, and began to see things within it that made no sense. Sometimes the aliens were tall and thin, and sometimes they were short and squat. Sometimes they wore suits of silver, and sometimes they wore no clothes at all. The book contradicted ITSELF, they realized. How could something that told an ultimate truth do that?
In the end, the people moved away from belief in the book, and in the aliens themselves. They told themselves that perhaps the aliens did exist, and had visted the old man as he had said, but he had passed the word along to his grandson only after his own memories of the events had grown faulty.
So they began to make use of the things forbidden to them by the old ways, and their culture slowly grew to be more permissive about such things. A strong core of people still believed the old ways to be the Right and True way to live, but realized that they could not entirely prevail against this new awareness.
But this did not stop them from trying. In various places, they grew powerful once again, and threatened the balance that had been struck. And against them rose up the disbelievers, and once again an accord had to be reached, where the two sides swore not to engage in violent action against one another.
And history wore on.
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Maybe we should all ask ourselves, why do we believe what we do? Does faith trump knowledge, and, if so, what would trump faith?
Updated to replace the wrong word in the last sentence.
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