prompt: date, title: Mr. Bad Example in misc. flash fiction

There are some things we will never know. If you consider the vastness of this universe, how long it’s been and will be around, the percentage of things-knowable by the human race is so infinitesimally small may as well be a rounding error. Everything we know from rudimentary baking down to the leptons and the quarks, it isn’t even a drop in an ocean. And that’s for the whole span of the human race! In the measly eighty-or-so years we’ll get, even less, one drop within a sea of that initial miniscule bead. A rounding error within a rounding error is all you will ever know, and you’re probably smarter than most humans that have ever lived. You are reading me, after all, that puts you way ahead of the learning curve.

So, knowing all the things that we can never know, for all we know, what we might think of when we speak of God may just be a near-to-birth baby in some sort of larger cosmic womb. Maybe we’re just microscopic particles of amniotic fluids surrounding that tiny godling as it gestates in the belly of all-that-could-ever be. It’s possible, for all we know, we haven’t even figured out cold fusion, we’re barely out of the caves.

And maybe blind and all alone in there, that god thinks that it’s the only thing, the highest thing, that the fluid it swims in is a kingdom for its play, with no conception that us little drops may be alive themselves. With little knowledge that it only lives at all with sustenance from its universal mother’s very flesh, no, it presumes it must be mighty, it must be the only one. It must be cruelly strong, indeed, when really it’s just a helpless stupid baby, not even ready to suckle at a breast.

For all we know, that’s why our big and manly leader-gods are all so harsh and vain, Jupiters and Jehovahs, Odins and Allahs, half-formed and dim, lacking empathy, never understanding they’re part of something so much bigger. They think they’re independent. Their kicks in utero, attempts to bully their perceived domain, sloshing us around as if they actually owned us, actually created us. I wonder if that ancient mom knows the abuse we take from a cruel god-king or if She thinks that’s just Her child-to-be tossing and turning in his sleep.

Just maybe, what so many think a god is something smaller, a blinkered little whining man-baby. Maybe that’s why so many of our so-called leaders believe that they must act just the same. They can’t accept they’re really part of something so large, they can never really know the whole of it.

Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Nearly everything there has ever been or will ever be is something you will never know, no human will ever know. But we can have an idea, an educated guess at least, about goddamn nearly everything and that must count for something. It cuts down on the boredom, anyway.