In the Flood story, there was most likely a local flood that was bad enough that created a shared memory, like 9-11, except that their superstition turned their gods into terrorists just as tornados today are still classified as “acts of God”. Whether you believe the writer’s view of gods or not, the blame in both the stories of Noah and Gilgamesh were the same. Both stories blamed humanity in the same way that Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, and others find people to blame for natural disasters. The “light side” of this is that it provokes society to reflect on its own morality. The “dark side” of this is that the understanding of that morality can be controlled and the idea that “God hates” _____ creates justification for them to hate, target, and oppress that group of people.

To say these are just stories is fundamentally myopic. These stories have real-life consequences and impact. The story is spread like an intelligent virus, as a set of instructions masked by the artistic nature of the story, allowed past the natural mental defenses, and installs a set of ideas that filters the perception of the world; especially the concept of “the others”. The story creates a narrative expressing the conflict between Good and Evil. Our brains naturally compute this the same as a computer breaks everything down to 1s and 0s. We can break everything down into positive or negative but it always relates to the point of view of the observer.

Am I, rhetorically speaking, good or evil? If I don’t want to be evil then I place myself on the side of good and I question the morality of those who I do not know to be asking the same question or wanting exactly the same thing as me. What’s that? Peace, Love, and Harmony. What do I do to those who threaten Peace? Do I then War against them? Those who threaten Love, do I Hate them? Those who threaten Harmony, do I cut them off and antagonize or vilify them? What is my role in all this? What is my role in the world?

An individual person is a tiny cell in the larger body of humanity that exists in both time and space. Each cell is an expression of humanity that is living an individual experience. Humanity has billions of eyes, billions of ears, fingers, mouths, etc. But we are divided by thin walls and we only work because we communicate and share resources with the group/organ that surrounds us. We can either accept each other like healthy cells, or we can try to take over and destroy each other which is the behavior of cancerous cells. Cells have a natural life cycle; however, unnatural events can damage them. Unnatural events can also cause the cells in one part of the body to do more of the work/lifting than they should.

Stories have a way of creating a mental construct to measure or “judge” other cells. This aspect of life is expressed by writers as a judgmental God, separating the wheat from the tares; the 1s from the 0s. Instead of the truth: that we are both things and therefore communicate our own stories as a procession of 1s and 0s, the story allows us to buy into the notion that we are the 1s doing 1 things and others are the 0s doing 0 things. Good… and evil. We simulate alternate realities of people doing good or bad things and we “process” that information. Even if the stories in the bible are fiction, they still create alternate realities that we can virtually visit through our understanding and consciousness, and judge. And as we judge, we learn. We learn the consequences of those who were “good” and “evil” from the perspective of the people we are virtually possessing by imagining ourselves in their shoes.

If you think it’s horrible to steal someone’s land, that’s good. But at the same time, you weren’t there. You weren’t the people on either side. If we transport ourselves into bodies on one side of the conflict it’s much easier to find a way for the conflict to make sense. We can find a way to justify taking their land by claiming it is our destiny and that God gave it to us. How do we know God gave it to us? Because we were able to take it. Now if the same group of people who took the land come into contact with another group of people who think exactly the same way and who possess exactly the same reasoning and justification, will they agree that God wants them to die so that this other group of people can have their land? Or will they fearfully create a huge and powerful military to stop anyone from doing to them what they did to another group of people who will never get back what was taken? 1s… and 0s…

Because the story aligns a group to a justification that allows them to fight for power, control, and domination, the story doesn’t need to prove their worth or “righteousness”. It only needs to disprove the worthiness or righteousness of “the others”. They are the empire. Whether that’s good for them or not, they have the power and we don’t. The battles to free ourselves from one empire can easily become the battles that the empire was envisioned to prevent. An empire means peace if you are in or on the side of the empire. But freedom means that the empire will always be fighting and therefore peace is the lie that empires tell to obtain power. We can look through history to see the truth of this. Through millions of lives and deaths we have established this fact and yet it is a lesson we are still learning; still fighting.

There will always be people who fight the empire. There will always be rebels. There will always be those, like Bob Marley, who tell the story of the oppressed, the marginalized, the “others” who had their land or freedom or power stripped away for the sake of others who justify it by creating a mental construct of superior status. The moral failing of the takers is often mischaracterized as strength. And so they and their descendants who didn’t have to repeat the violence of their ancestors, hold onto the “faith” that their actions were necessary to their own survival and even the survival of those they terrorized and slaughtered. The story told from one side justifies the actions of that side against the other. The only difference between the sides is who is telling the story.

And so the science of storytelling is such that the perspective of the story acts as instructions to creating a simulated world where we can compute right and wrong as 1s and 0s and get different answers based on who is asking the question. The bible’s story is told by the oppressed who then become oppressors and then go back to being oppressed. And then in the new trilogy/testament, because of their chosen one, the mantle of oppressed and oppressor switches and the oppressed become the oppressors in the Dark ages. It’s predictable to the point of comedy but only after seeing the shift back and forth from a higher or outside perspective. That’s what happens when it’s no longer “our story”.

When it is a story about a galaxy “far far away”, this is the cue for the mind to lower its blasters and shields. It’s us, but at the same time… not us. Therefore it can reflect the 1s and 0s of human history back at us without forcing us to choose sides based on which side we were born into. We weren’t born into either. So we can look at how both sides ebb and flow and create a tide that pushes around the Galaxy and keeps the conflict alive. The brilliance of this story is that we can also see how that galactic battle is waged within. This is the key understanding and moral of the story. It is the reason why Jedi realists exist. Once we see the war within we gain the understanding that we have an effect on our galaxy. If we can find balance within then suddenly our judgment isn’t biased by our own need or reaction to scarcity that often corrupts and makes people tend toward hoarding and greed while others lack and suffer. The further “away”... “far far away” they, “the others”, are, the easier it is to see them as aliens and alienate them into being so different from us that we don’t have to care how what we do to survive affects them because we buy into stories of us vs them. Good v. Evil. And we’re always good.

So no matter if we’re talking about the distant future or the distant past, both provide a medium for stories and storytelling that can transport us into different times and mindsets while still seeing the familiar faces, conflicts, and problems to solve. A good story enables the writer to solve problems by getting other people to share his or her perspective and judgment. Without even knowing the Canaanites, the Amorites, etc. we can have a disfavorable view that biases us against them so that we don’t care if they die. And yet the story is told as if God is judging; a being who should be seeing both sides from the outside and from a higher vantage point. But instead, he takes a side because his position is simply a mask for the storyteller. And so it is true and yet far from known that "ye are gods".