Dec 13, 2022 4 min read

This time of the year, when negative things happen, they always seem to register more deeply, to hit harder, and to feel even more emotionally upsetting. This is because it is a time when believers would ideally like to celebrate with peace, love, generosity, gratitude and kindness as the theme of each day. When that is not the case, it is more disturbing.

For the vast majority of us, at least initially, our birth geography pretty much dictates the religious beliefs connected with the part of the world where we live. Christian, Hindu, Islam, Shinto, Jewish are all examples of religions that oftentimes have geographic connections. With an estimated 4,200 different religions worldwide, as a result, those religions vary significantly. Although there seems to be only nine types of gods worshipped through those various religions, it is estimated there are at least 8,000 to 12,000 different gods that are currently being worshipped worldwide.

Let’s look at an even bigger, more confusing picture of mankind’s challenges on this planet where we deal with both heaven and nature. Theodosius Grigorovich Dohzhansky was a prominent Ukrainian American geneticist and evolutionary biologist who was credited with the following pronouncement: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” I’d like to explore just a little bit about nature, evolution and how it relates to us as inhabitants on the planet Earth.

I’ve always considered the fact that a god who could have figured out all of the nuanced deviations and minute complexities of this world and the galaxies beyond has to have a more sophisticated understanding of time and space than any mere human.

In Stephen J. O’Brien’s book “Tears of the Cheetah,” he states, “Scientists who study geology and the planetary history estimate the earth to be on the order of 4.5 billion years old. Life started, they discern … slowly over millennia of chemical reactions in an oxygenated primordial soup that slowly oozed into a murky swamp of the earliest self-reproducing microorganisms.” While this digresses from fundamentalist beliefs, these are accepted scientific proclamations.

He goes on to describe a science journalist, James C. Reggie, who proposed a graphic image of geological time. He had imagined a camera aimed at the earth some 750 million years ago that captured a perspective each year up until the present time.

By taking a single image every year, the camera would cover 2.1 million years each day and each month would represent 62 million years. In this scenario “At 11:55 p.m., recorded human history and civilization as we know it began, and four seconds before midnight, the first automobile was invented. These time comparisons are important in order to present my thesis on the subject of the immaturity and general faults of man as a species.

We haven’t been around long enough to grow, mature, and understand what this is all about. One way we deal with our lack of civility is through the evolution of those multiple religions. Besides preparing us for the afterlife, they were also intended to help provide us with crystal clear rules and regulations that would keep us from constantly killing each other over trivial issues.

Unfortunately, our materialistic desire to own and control as much as physically possible over our short time on earth continues to carve us out uniquely as the only species of animal that kills for sport and pleasure, that kills for land, and kills for treasure.

So, as we celebrate our Christian and Jewish holidays of Christmas and Hanukah, let’s remember that we are all here for a short time. In fact, in the big picture, we’re here for what amounts to seconds, and during that time, our challenge should be to leave this place better than we found it.

“Let every heart prepare Him room, And heaven and nature sing, And heaven and nature sing, And heaven and heaven and nature sing.”

Nick Jacobs of Windber is a health-care consultant and author of two books.