A brief history of God and the moon

I checked social media tonight and saw people arguing politics and then opened our home’s sliding back door to let the dogs out. The moon hung in the sky like an angelic being, glowering through the clouds, trying to tell me something. “What does this mean?” I thought. So of course I hit Wikipedia.

Turns out our Moon (I’ll use caps now out of respect) was formed 4.5 billion years ago, about 2/3’s of the way into the entire history of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old, when the Earth was still a molten blob. There are several theories: The Earth was spinning fast as a bunch of hot metal, and flicked the Moon off (but this doesn’t really work, since why didn’t everything coalesce around gravity to be one planet?); or the spinning mess simply formed both Earth and Moon at the same time (hm); or, the best theory that most scientists now believe, another big object in the chaos of our early solar system (called poetically “Theia”) slammed into the molten early Earth and churned material that became the Moon.

This last theory is validated by the fact the composition of the Moon is much lighter than the Earth, as if our early planet spun off some unneeded light material, like you on Sunday morning cutting your fingernails. The moon is the light bunch of molten stuff we spewed into the vacuum after a chaotic punch.

The moon is beautiful, it is paired with us in harmonic gravitation dance, and it is our detritus.

The reason I mention all this is I’m trying to put our political discussions into perspective. So let’s agree our Moon spun off 4.5 billion years ago; life on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago; the first sexual organisms that had male vs. female creatures competing/mating just over 1 billion years in the past; and humans arrived 200,000 years back in history — meaning 99.999% of all the universal history has gone before us people, with dramatic risks and changes such as a massive Theia planet orb smacking our young Earth, and then dinosaurs being wiped out thanks to an asteroid, and then somehow we smart mammals arrived. And so people popped up in Africa.

Once we figured out weapons, thanks to our opposable thumbs and growing brains, the fighting against nature to survive turned inward to ourselves.

And now, a few weeks into our most recent period of the universe, we’re screaming about whether hominids who believe in one version of God should be able to hang out with people who believe in a slightly different model of spiritual beings, on a planet that has no national lines carved on it but in which we impose such fiction.

Not judging. Just putting the last few weeks of arguments into perspective.