Pretend videogames and technology.

This morning Grace told me that Jonah was laying in bed making all these songs. Like a high pitched thing falling in cartoon sound effect, and then explosions.
"What are you doing Dai Dai?" Grace asked.
"Just playing Angry birds." he said laying there by himself staring at the blank wall.
After hearing this I shared that as I child I had made myself a pretend Gameboy out of cardboard, complete with buttons and everything. In retrospect my mother was pretty upset or disturbed by this because she found it depressing and eventually bought me a Gameboy. The thing is on that real Gameboy, you can only play the games that you buy. Whereas on a Card board pretend Gameboy, you can play whatever game you want. Granted you could theoretically play whatever interactice game you want out in the real world running through the forest or something. But when you run around a cramped and crowded apartment, you can get hurt or maybe your parents tell you to stop it, or maybe there are just times when you would rather sit down and move less. So you make a pretend cardboard game boy. Let's just say I'm not taking Dai Dai's pretend Angry bird playing as a cue to get him anything new. After all, we have angry birds on the Roku, if we can ever find that remote (and I have a suspicion that Dai Dai is the only person in the house that really knows where that remote is.) Plus there is PBS kids on the computer, which has games that are not only educational, but impossible to lose. Too easy? Please. Don't you remember LOSING a game as a child and how frustrating that was over something that was fake and not educational? Whereas Noah and Jonah are not only happily entertained for long periods of time.... they also have cochlea in there vocabulary. A word I only learned in middle school.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with pretending you have video games, or screens, or all these things. In fact, if you believe in Ancient Alien theory, (which I at least entertain as a possibility because doesn't that make more physical sense then believing in whatever the original legend, or religious story says?) Then much of Religion is based on a reconstruction of technology that people saw long ago. The clincher for that idea in my mind was when they showed the effects of the U.S. military on some "primitive" tribes in the South Pacific during World War II. Basically after the U.S. military pulled out a new religion was created. The tribe started making giant airplanes and such out of straw and recreating what happened and their version of the story was that the U.S. soldiers who brought gifts of Spam etc. in return for forced or at least coerced labor, were the tribe peoples ancestors who had come back to take care of them. And they would eventually come back and take care of them again and they were just awaiting their return. Eventually people did go back to the island and saw all of this and I don't know what has now happened to the tribe or the island.

Now some people would say, "How silly" or use words like "ignorant, stupid, primitive, foolish" when talking about the tribes people. But the truth is they are intelligent, creative and imaginative human beings trying to work out what they saw through ritual and re-enactment, which is probably what the religions that the U.S. soldiers themselves practiced had origins in thousands of years ago. Also if you ever had to teach a class you would know you need all kinds of bells and whistles to get the attention of the group. Now can you imagine teaching a whole tribe? Not just the smart people, not just the hardworking people, not just the young, not just the old, but a whole tribe of people. Trying to get them to remember what happened and trying to pass down that history, without a written language (frankly even with a written language it is still difficult because not everyone reads, and not everyone who reads necessarily will want to read your story) Try to get all those people's attention and pas the story on for generations because at some point knowing that story might become important. Telling the story is not enough. You need to make a big life-sized airplane out of straw to really make them understand what it looked like. So the religion itself is not stupid.
 Now if there is some sort of sacrifice involved, human or otherwise, then that is misguided. (I would argue though that this country still does have a form of human sacrifice. We just make it fit into our legal system)
But anyway as long as you are having fun during your practice and not "wasting" anything there's nothing wrong with it and the ritual is an interactive way to  record what happened in a way that anyone can understand it even you don't read or don't like to pay attention to stories verbally. I mean you will gather what is going on even if you are deaf because the created planes out of straw. Plus eventually someone will see this straw plane that can't fly, and try to make a real plane. Aspects of these rituals are therefore really good for society. Even animal sacrifice, is okay (as long as you believe in eating animals) and you eat the animal afterward. Then it's like a history lesson/barbecue/feeding the needy/party/discussion about where the tribe has been and where it is going in the future all in one big ritual. If we ran stuff more like that today as a country, we actually might get more done.

Of course it is important to learn who the U.S. military really was and who they are and where they are and all that, but that doesn't mean the rituals themselves were bad. In fact, you can still fit the tribal story with real one if you believe in reincarnation.