A religion for mites

I was part of a conversation today about whether or not we believed in the concept of a “god”. I posited that while I don’t discount the possibility of something so far beyond us that we can’t even properly comprehend it, I don’t necessarily think of it/they/whatever in the context of a god, nor do I think that it really has anything to do with us.

Whatever it might be, it probably isn’t even anymore aware of us than we are of the microbial life that surrounds and lives inside us. Its entirely possible that we’re nothing more than the gut bacteria in the cosmic colon of some vast super-organism that doesn’t even know we exist.

This of course, got me thinking about religion and scale.

At any given moment, we’re covered in entirely nations worth of microscopic life. They have their own social rules, rival communities, and territorial squabbles all playing out on this human landscape, complete with terrain, climate zones, and weather systems.

I bet they even have what we would consider some rudimentary form of religion, since all religion has its roots in trying to make sense of one’s environment and one’s own place in it. Of course, the drives and needs of the skin mites on your face are vastly more simplistic than what we might think of, but I think the same basic social mechanics scale up and down basically the same…every time we shower, sunbathe, go hiking, build a shed, all having some influence over those perceive the changes in their environment.

Granted, I don’t think it would be worship in a way that we would recognize, but the need to try to conceptualize things like life, death, environmental disaster, et al, probably still exists at that level, albeit in a very simplistic way.

Logically, it would follow up the chain as well. I don’t think we could probably conceptualize the belief systems of whatever life we would be the comparative skin mites to.

As above, so below.