THE PROMISE OF A RAINBOW

Yesterday evening there were thunder clouds in the sky and the weather forecast warned of a storm and heavy rains.

Amidst the chaos we captured this beautiful double rainbow in the sky behind our home.

The rainbow is a striking weather phenomenon that always has a calming effect on the human mind while in a turbulent environment of thunder and rain.

I can now see why Noah (through simplistic reasoning)

interpreted the rainbow as GOD’s promise that He would never again destroy the world by rain and floods.

Religion works very strongly on human cursory and unstudied (nonscientific) perception when the human mind is pressured by perplexity, anxiety, fear, and desperate need. Religion enables the human mind to arouse imagination through narratives that create hope, anticipation, and satisfaction. Hope, anticipation, and satisfaction often enable the troubled human mind to overcome negativity and become positive. This transformation energizes the will to action, which ‘saves’ the individual from a situation of despondency and despair.

The change would immediately be noted by the religious as divine intervention and an act of GOD, overlooking the natural circumstances that contributed to the positive change.

There are however times and situations in which positive changes do not occur at all, like when natural catastrophes strike and people and property are destroyed. Rainbows do consistently show up, but so do thunder, rain, and floods which still cause severe death and devastation around the world as we are hearing of these days more frequently than ever before. Those dead in floods are gone for ever and will not return, and so will homes, cattle, and other forms of material wealth.

Rainbows are formed when the sun's light comes into contact with rain water in the skies above. It is just one minuscule atmospheric happening amongst billions others visible and invisible to the naked eye.

Do they all have specific religious meanings? No. The religious meanings that are attached to them, have usually originated in primitive observations of extremely sophisticated natural phenomena.

This is not to say that there may not be a Creator or a creative force or energy fused within the natural sphere and/or beyond the natural sphere. Philosophically, if a Creator or a creative force/energy can be thought of (idealism/rationalism) and is experienced (empiricism), then at least in relative terms it should be considered real.

So then, this reflection isn't about invalidating the Creator or creative energy, or questioning their validity. Though my understanding of the Creator or creative being has undergone significant change in the three years, I still pray all the time everyday to my Creator who I love and am deeply committed to. That has not changed and will never change. This is a small piece of critical examination of religious narratives, their origins, the worldviews they promote, and their scientific validity. Religions began with human beings and hence will have in them the capacity for error. Nature and the power that brought everything to life have been around much before humans and their religions, and are essentially and qualitatively different from religion.