Every morning, well most mornings, we do follow a ritual. We pray with our youngest son and then check the internet for news.
The prayers we say are very, very old in a very, very old language. According to tradition Abraham was the first to say some of them and his son Isaac was the one who started the whole morning prayer ritual in the first place.
We use an old prayer shawl, we have newer but the one we use is the mini version belonging to our father and before that his brother and before that his father and we think though cannot be sure our grandfather’s father.
We know it was made in Lithuania and crossed the Atlantic around 1900. It was in the trenches in World War I, on the beach of the allied invasion of North Africa in World War II, saw the hydrogen bomb go off in the Nevada Desert and now more mornings than not it rests on our shoulders.
After old prayers in an old shawl we check the news, first national and international and then our two favorites websites Archeology and Discovery.
We are amateur science nerds and we love hearing of new finds, new theories and new discoveries.
An observer may see a contradiction in our morning ritual the first part being devotions to G0d through religion with the second part devotion to science.
With the current questions and or attacks against the current crop of presidential candidates religious beliefs by some in the media, it is clear there is a general belief that religion and scientific theory are mutually exclusive of each other.
We and our prayer shawl beg to differ.
In addition to the great and not so great events of a a century and a half my old prayer shawl has seen many scientific theories rise and fall.
For example when it was made in the latter half of the 19th century the universe was suspended in an unknown substance known as yelm.
The smallest possible particles then known were atoms and according to the relatively new theory of evolution biological change happened at a glacial speed.
We can laugh at those beliefs now. Now that we know better.
But do we really know?
Are all the current scientific theories just punch lines in some joke for high school science students of the future just like those of the past are giggled about today?
Probably.
If we went back 150 years and told our great grandfather of the miracles and wonders of today, he wouldn’t think we were talking about science but rather magic. he might even think we went insane.
That is not to say scientific theory should be disregarded but rather should be taken with a grain of salt. One discovery, one new fact can and has changed everything.
Well not everything.
The prayers we say in the morning are the same ones our great grandfather recited and his great grand father before him.