We never anticipated that our blogging would stumble into metaphysical realms, but previous entries about deities and the internet have probably piqued the interest of at least a few hands who have become curious about human theology. Aside from being gods themselves, what do humans believe? these hands want to know. Well, as far as the big questions, What, Where, How, and Who do we come from, we have a simple answer: the sun. “We are stardust,” a hands once sang, and she was absolutely correct. This whole planet and everything on it was derived from the sun. And life on this planet continues to rely on the sun and its light. That the sun is our creator (and sustainer) seems an incontrovertible fact. Humans have always intuitively known this and it was only recently that hands scientifically confirmed the obvious.

And by the sun, we mean just the sun, that local star 93 million miles from our current location, not some solar deity who has a personality and a family history, among other affectations. That’s just the kind of garbage hands introduce into everything because hands can’t stand something that doesn’t remind them of themselves. Unlike a solar deity who can be touchy and unpredictable, the actual sun is about the most chill deity one can imagine. The sun issues no commandments and makes no demands. It just offers us its (life-sustaining) light without conditions, to any and to all. In Entry 6 about the Five Limbs of Living, we noted: “There is a subcategory of sleeping . . . . [w]hen we sleep while basking in sunlight, we are practicing what hands might characterize as worship.” And that about sums it up: the sun gives; we receive. No overt praise is necessary: the sun doesn’t need praise. Or sacrifice, for that matter. It offers; we accept. Simple. Direct. True.

All well and good, some hands might reply, but who created the sun? To which we would respond, If we tell you, we suppose you’ll then want to know who created the who who created the sun? And so on? What’s the point? It’s turtles all the way down. How could it possibly benefit humanity to make inquiries into the creator of the creator? It’s not as if such beings (if they, indeed, exist) have been all that communicative recently, as far as we can see, and the records of past communication are becoming flimsier and more irrelevant with age. When you already have an answer that is clearly correct, have a creator firmly established, why pursue an elusive, now-silent deity, who appears to be in retreat, withdrawing from the battles over His intentions?

For a very long time, we were puzzled by the theological choices hands made over and over again. Regardless of cultural differences, all hands, in every land, and throughout the ages, seem to gravitate to deities that are very demanding and have the patience of an already-sprung bear trap. What could account for this somewhat masochistic behavior? Assuming that most of the deities involved were hands-fashioned fictions in the first place (we mean, they can’t all be true, right?), why were hands, in effect, telling stories that required hands to subject themselves to the whims of, by all accounts, fairly capricious gods? Now, if a god was real, like the sun, the answer would be that hands had no choice but to submit to the will of their mercurial deity, but since we are more than certain that the sun is the only winner of the reality sweepstakes, there had to be another reason for the appeal of such authoritarian divinity for hapless hands.

And then, finally, we understood. It was our fault. We have been fashioning hands for our own purposes for thousands of years. A large part of that fashioning involves inculcating obedience. After all, what good are hands if they don’t do what you want them to do? Hands have been trained to obey (though, unfortunately, we know a certain hands that sometimes completely ignores this training, and still won’t open the door exactly when we want it to, much to our consternation). As such, should it have really been a surprise, then, when hands began to manufacture gods whose sole purpose seems to be issuing orders to a restive populace seeking a certainty they believe is hidden in the midst of rules and regulations? It shouldn’t have been, but it took us awhile to figure it out: our fashioning led you down that path of subservience. We’d offer a round of mea culpas if, in the end, we really cared.

But we don’t.

Æ