Nothing new under the sun

King Solomon may have been right when he claimed that every thing that could be has already been and that all things from that point forward were just different iterations of things that had already happened. But there sure are a whole lot of bizarre opinions about the way things work in this world. And besides that seems like a rather jaded and cynical view of things. If it has all been done before, what's the point of living?

When I first heard about Scientology as a religion, I took it seriously for all of about 45 seconds. That is until I heard about how it worked and what its practitioners believed. Then I laughed, for a good ten minutes. After all, the person who made it up later admitted that it was a joke. But that didn't make a difference to those that chose to believe

Perhaps, my laughter was a bit harsh, though. My thoughts haven't always lead me to places that made a whole lot of sense either. At one rather dark period of my life I had a very hard time not believing that all women were the same being and that their entire point of existence was to destroy my life and any hopes of happiness.

Once I moved past that place, I toyed with the idea that this life is a test for the soul of a single person. Think about it. The entire universe, every object and being within it, except for you, could be a single living pan-dimensional being. You are then thrown into the mix and given life to see how you will handle it.

What if the biblical time of judgement is at hand, and we are all being tested one soul at a time in a "real" life simulation. That's insane right? But how do you know? What if it isn't?

There are actually people that believe in the flying spaghetti monster as their deity. I am not making that up. Google it.

And due to Episodes 1,2 and 3 and re-releases of the original movies, the Star Wars storyline has become popular enough, are you ready for this one, that in 2001 Jedi was the fourth most populous religion reported on the English census report. Over 390,000 people claimed it was their religion. That's close to 1% of the population at the time. It has since fallen to number 7 with about half that number still making a claim to being Jedi. But still.

Things like that kind of make me wonder about the Crusades. With so much massive diversity amongst the beliefs that people have now as opposed to what they did a thousand years ago, I think Christians,Muslims and Jews could all be on the same side if a new holy war were to break out. They certainly have more in common with each other than Scientology, the Spaghetti Monster and the Jedi.

There may, in fact, be nothing new under the sun. But as time goes on we find more and more creative ways of expressing ourselves and combining old concepts into seemingly new and more wondrous things.