Gods and Generals and Rainbows

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Welcome back.  In the movie, Gods and Generals, there is a scene after the battle of Fredricksburg where the Northern Lights appear in the sky above the living and the dead.  

Shelby Foote mentions this rare occurrence in Ken Burns' excellent documentary The Civil War.  Foote suggests that the aurora borealis would have engendered religious meaning to both sides. Indeed, religious sentiment is expressed in the movie.

I have never seen this magnificent display, but I have seen pictures. I hope to one day travel North to watch the night sky blaze with those luminous streams.  I imagine it appears quietly over the night sky, looking so eerie and divine that one cannot help but attribute it to a god.  

It is, however, a natural display of electrons from solar winds interacting with our atmosphere.  The swirls "follow the lines of the magnetic force generated by the earth's core."

The timeliness of the event struck the soldiers, and scholars today, as being significant.  It happened on the very night after the Rebels decimated the Federal army.  

If the Rebels saw the Northern Lights as a sign that God was with them, as they most surely did, they were proven to be bad interpreters of a natural event.  History has proven since Appomattox which side God favored, if we think of God favoring one side over another in a war.

RAINBOWS

A rainbow is similar to an aurora borealis in that it appears in the sky.  We have all seen a rainbow.  It is a spectacular sight, often making us stop what we are doing to stare.  This can be a bad idea if we are driving.

To ancients, the appearance of a gigantic arch of many colors bending over the sky must have been a miracle.  In the Hebrew stories of the flood, the rainbow signifies God's promise to never destroy humanity by flood again.  

In the older, Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the rainbow is Ishtar's necklace shown yet with no promise.  

Of course, a rainbow is merely sunlight shining through raindrops.  It tends to happen later in the day because of where the sun's position is in the sky.

A rainbow would appear anywhere, and anytime, on any planet with sun and rain without gods or a God making it happen.  It is a law of nature.  It just happens that sunlight through rain or glass is bent into a prism.

I took a picture recently of a rainbow fragment shining on my dining room wall.  It was not much bigger than a half dollar.  The sun had dipped close enough to the horizon to shine into my window and create those splendid colors.

Again, to the ancients, the appearance of a rainbow must have been a sign that the gods or a god were real. Even now, I thrill to the sight of a rainbow.  If the sun is shining late in the day, and there is rain, I start looking for it.  I have to be careful not to wreck my car.  
It makes me think of God too, but not as a divine, corporeal being who waits for the sun and rain so he can stop what he is doing, and then bend a bow, and then make it appear magically in the sky.  

Rather, I am one who appreciates how a natural world generates an epiphany or a numinous sense of God.

I often wonder if an atheist can see a rainbow without the idea of a god ever occurring to him or her.  Often, the experience of God comes as an emanating association with life as easily and naturally as colors come from light and rain.

Blessings...