The Pencil and other little bits of philosophy

My kids love this tale of the little pencil who created people, animals, and places, and a little paintbrush who added color to their black, white, and grey world. When minor complaints arose about how things were, the pencil, after much pondering, drew an eraser. At first the addition of the little eraser made the world a better place. Change could happen. Change is good, right? Well...until this crazy little eraser became a bit too obsessed with its power. Our hero the pencil must think fast before it also is erased since this eraser is erasing all in its path, much like a tornado wipes out whatever gets in its way. Obviously not much of a thinker, since hey what would happen once there was no pencil to draw things to erase, the eraser just keeps charging ahead. What a kook! Well I don't want to spoil the surprise, but given that it's a children's story, you probably would expect that all is well in the end. After all without the pencil how could The Runaway Dinner be created?

What I loved about this book was that later in the day after reading it, the M asked where did the Pencil come from? I like it when one of my kids, especially in the 6 year old set, asks the questions that show they are thinking about more than where skittles come from and can I have some now?

Where did the Pencil come from? Well that would be an easy question were I especially religious, which while I believe in God, I don't think of myself as religious. My answer to him was that a lot of people would think that God made the pencil, at first ignoring the possibility that the pencil was a metaphor for God which actually makes more sense. I don't think fast during pop quizzes either. I did also suggest that some people would think the pencil just came to be, that it just was there, but it seemed hard to believe that it didn't come from somewhere. He was pretty much done with the conversation at that point, though I continued it in my head for days. (Several days later he did ask where the Universe came from, lest you think my incompetence at answering made it so he'd never ask a thoughtful question again.)

What haunted me were my own questions about religion. Years ago I came to the conclusion that I did believe in God; that it was too miraculous for all of this wonder to have come from molecules in chaos coming together just right. It's religion itself that gets me. Its humanness seems almost separate from God. It's attempt to explain the unexplainable is ... well ... so human. Frankly it's quite beautiful to me that we try so hard to find our place, to figure out the whys, and what is right. I just cannot believe that a single religion explains it all. I always wonder about the changes in human thinking over the ages. The Greeks truly believed in their Gods. The Romans believed in them, too. American Indians also use(d?) deities to reflect the beauty we see in our world, some of the fears, too. Even modern day religions have evolved along with human thought. My own attempt at explaining it all was to conclude that maybe God speaks to us each in the way we can understand. And this I truly believe.

But I would like to think that people do good because it's right, just plain right, to behave that way rather than because God mandated it. Even though I do believe in God, I do feel rankled when I perceive that people who follow a religion seem to feel morally superior to those who don't, for whatever reason they don't. I believe that you can do good without being told to.

I love that religions talk to our human frailties. I love Christianity's forgiveness and acceptance that we aren't perfect, can't be perfect (though we should try), and when we fail to be perfect we're still okay in this world. I'm also intrigued by representations of evil, because it is part of the awareness that we aren't perfect, that we become tempted, and that we should try with all of our might be rise above those temptations and see that the right path doesn't go there.

It is wondrous to me that we've created our societies in all of their complexity, that we've got many religions also very complex. I can't help but think that all of this has been put into place by God. But I bristle when someone talks about praying to God for something more concrete than strength, acceptance, tolerance, and knowledge. I don't get why God might chose one person over another because of prayer. After all I thought God had a plan, a plan beyond our capability to understand.

I wonder sometimes, though, if he would like to have an eraser. But then I guess you can't really go back in time to change things, can you?