I was having a conversation with another parent out amongst the hordes of miniscule demons, ninjas, princesses, autobots, and zombies.
He complained about having more mosquitoes in the area than he’s ever seen and he hates mosquitoes. I just laughed and laughed. You see, I’m from the coast of Texas. Where the water is warm and still and there is lots of it. While living there, I have killed, in one swipe of my hand, more mosquitoes than I have even seen in my entire time in central Texas.
It’s all relative. Hurricane Sandy was a horrible disaster… in New Jersey. In Florida or the Gulf coast, no one would even have noticed it. People in Chicago start dying at 90 degree temps and 50% humidity. Where I’m from, that’s normal April weather. Three years ago, we went for 45 days with temps over 110 and no rain. Of course, to me, anything below 50 degree is cold. I had the fireplace on the other night and it almost got down to 40 degrees. In Chicago, they don’t even put on long pants until it gets below 40 degrees all day long.
Everything is relative to you, your culture, your experiences. What is horrible child abuse in one family is routine punishment in another. What is common courtesy in one culture is weird and shocking to another culture. And I”m not talking about the US vs. aboriginal cultures here. I’m talking within the state and within the US.
That is something that a lot of people don’t get. Of course, they’ve never had to as they have stayed within their own culture and never experienced how anyone else might act or think. Religions are really bad about this kind of relational experience. They only listen to their own culture. Everything is filtered by their culture until they don’t have a clue what the outside is like. I’m not even talking about cults and communes here, just normal religion.
To almost every church (not religion, but individual churches), everyone else is wrong and going to hell. Very few of them say things like “there are many ways to God” and the like. It’s an entire system of governance based on control, fear, and threat of punishment… and so many, many people don’t even understand that there are other ways to think about things. They will accept from their church things that they wouldn’t accept from their own parents.
Our modern planet exists in a constant state of exchanging ideas, attitudes, and concepts. Yet religion is still stuck in the deep past. They literally cannot deal with a modern society.
